Continual Distractions of a Scattered Mind

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Tag Archives: Earth Day

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to get better. It’s not.

Sigh. People I just… sigh. Perhaps Dr. Suess had a bit of the Nostradamus, or maybe the warning theme of corporate greed and environmental waste was appropriate in the Seventies, too (cough-COUGH). Not like there weren’t any gas/environment/recession problems back then, right?

Zach missed a Nate the Great play last week that I – GASP- had the gall to attend with Elliot. To remain fair and balanced, I offered to take him to a movie on Sunday. I even ponied up the cash for movie popcorn, though I drew the line at the Red Dye #40 fruit punch, instead offering him a sip of my lawbreaking outside drink.

We watched. We laughed. We both cried; it’s SAD watching the Swomee-swans, the Brown Bar-ba-loots, and the Humming-fish leave after the last of the Truffula trees gets cut down. Rinse, Repeat.

We came home and planted sunflower seeds. I explained why it was necessary to pull weeds, and also why we were pulling them instead of spraying poisonous chemicals. We talked about why even those nature-things that are annoying (squirrels) have a place (without them burying acorns, there wouldn’t be any oak trees). We talked about a lot about how people get confused about what they think they thneed. I predict that this conversation will come up again later, despite thinking before I spoke– trying to make honesty* age appropriate isn’t easy.

*Okay, I don’t lie, but I do sometimes omit information. For example, I did not tell Zach that the “The Men’s Club” (oh, learning to read–double-edged sword) we pass on the way to karate is a strip club. And for that preschool, you may thank me.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to use this experience (and his reaction to it) as a conversation starter, a motivator. As a matter of fact, there’s a really neat collection of information being collected at The Lorax Project.

Reading the comments included in any online discussion of Trayvon Martin’s murder. It wasn’t until the comments that I fully realized how many of the annoyingly ignorant and racist have internet access. It wasn’t the “liberal media”, Obama, or Al Sharpton that shot that child in the street. That person is in hiding– AS HE SHOULD BE, dude killed an innocent CHILD.

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